Midnight's Children

I couldn't quite shake the idea that Salman Rushdie worked with an open copy of The Tin Drum by his side. But where Tin Drum felt to me like rich and moving reading experience, Midnight's Children felt clownish and empty. Reading it was like listening to the author shout LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME for hundreds of pages...and then it was over.

I can fully admit the writing itself is masterful, but I found myself wondering with almost every sentence: How can great writing be so empty of purpose and meaning? And also: How can such a skilled writer make the topic of Indian independence, and the resulting partition of India, such a dull reading experience?

Let me say more about this nagging Tin Drum echo that I heard throughout Midnight's show more Children--and why Midnight's children could mimic, but totally fail to capture the mastery of Tin Drum. Each book has countless minor characters who appear, play their part, and go away again. But in Tin Drum the characters are deeply felt, no matter how unrealistically portrayed, and in Midnight's Children the characters feel like windup toys. I think of Sigismund Markus in Tin Drum, a very minor character, the Jewish shopkeeper who commits suicide during Kristalnacht, versus Ilse Luben, who drowns herself in a lake before she makes any impression on the reader whatsoever, or Tai, a boatman who takes up many pages of narrative and who suffers an equally meaningless death. The death of Sigismund still moves me when I think about it, and the deaths of Ilse and Tai left nothing more than a great, boring, ho-hum, glad-they-are-gone-so-we-can-get-on-with-the-story feeling. Worse is the death of Vanita in childbirth--again my only feeling was that I had none.

Then I tried to frame the book as post-modern so of course it would use distancing effects as a way to call attention to its own fictions...but again the book compares so poorly with other postmodern novels, like those of Nabokov or Barthelme, which manage to use the same distancing effects to somehow bring a reader closer to all the beauty and tragedy of the human condition. This book in contrast just distances the reader.

So I'm left with a great wonderment that this is the book that wins the Booker of Bookers. show less

For me, a successful piece of magical realism is possible when the constraints and opportunities for the characters are set in some impossible way, which you promptly forget is artificial and become invested in. This is absolutely the case with the way the Midnight's Children can hear each other's voices, and is even mostly the case with the special powers of the main characters. At the end, when we learn about the rush of powers possessed by other Midnight's Children, it did all seem a bit artificial, but it didn't matter so much at that point. Within the world established at the start, it was a lot of fun to watch Saleem buffeted around by the various voices in his life.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/midnights-children-by-salman-rushdie/

My copy of Midnight’s Children was given to me 35 years ago by a dear friend who I have since fallen out of touch with. Opening it again was a return to the better times of that relationship, and I felt a warm glow of nostalgia just from the title page. I enjoyed it over Christmas in 1987, and I enjoyed it again now.

The book is the story of India in the last years of British rule and the first thirty-odd years of independence, and it covers also Pakistan and Bangladesh, because you can’t tell the full story otherwise. We know we are onto a good thing in the second chapter, when hereditary nasal problems prove an unexpected blessing to the narrator’s grandfather show more during the Amritsar massacre:

"As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather’s nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer’s right and twenty-five to his left; and Adam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. ‘Yaaaakh-thoooo!’ he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life."

The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is one of the thousand children born in the first hour of India’s independence, all of whom are endowed with supernatural powers of one kind or another. He is perpetually conflicted about his own identity, unaware that in fact he was swapped at birth with the child of a poorer neighbour. His life loops in and out of Indian (and Pakistani and Bangladeshi) history; his powers prove more a curse than a blessing; the political becomes personal and the personal political. It is tremendously engaging; sometimes funny, sometimes very bleak, sometimes both.

If you don’t know a lot about India (or Pakistan or Bangladesh), as I did not in 1987, you’ll learn a lot from this and enjoy the process. If you do know a bit more, I think you’d still enjoy it. I think the one point that has not aged all that well is that the protagonist is actually not a very pleasant person, especially to the women in his life (who are in general as well drawn as the men), and that gets a bit tiresome. But overall I can see why it was acclaimed at the time and why it remains popular. show less

His life is an allegory for the post-colonial history of his homeland, but is it real? is he insane? is he suffering from PTSD? Yes. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie follows the life of man born at the exact moment that India became an independent nation-state and how his life reflected that of the nation.

Rushdie writes the book from the perspective of its protagonist, Saleem Sinai, whose origins are as muddled as that of the nation itself at the time of independence. Throughout the book, the magical elements of Saleem’s familial—hereditary attributes and emotional pollution—and personal life are related by the character himself but instead of simply not mentioning the illogicalness of this Saleem addresses these magical show more connections directly at several points. As I said above Saleem’s life mirrors that of India’s from its independence in 1947 through the 1980s even though he himself doesn’t stay in India the entire time—living in Pakistan almost a decade until the Bangladesh Independence War of 1971—but that doesn’t stop their connection. Unlike Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, this magical realism novel kept me engaged throughout whether because Rushdie’s actual references to historical events compared to Allende’s allusions to Chilean history thus getting to the history addict in me or simply me liking Rushdie’s writing style over Allende’s. Not only was this Rushdie’s first novel, but it was also my first exposure to his writing, and it makes me interested in others of his work.

Midnight’s Children is an engaging read of how not only a nation, but individuals related to the end of the British Raj and an independent nations early history handled the change. show less

i did not expect this to be funny, but it is, in many places. it's also full of lyrical language and also weirdness. it's also dense and i know that there were many parts that were way over my head. i definitely enjoyed parts of this but overall i'm just not smart enough to really appreciate it. (i also had no idea that the indians did to the chinese what we did to the japanese and had internment camps. i always hate learning that other places in the world are just as bad as we are.)

fwiw, the narrator, lyndam gregory, is absolutely fantastic.

“Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”

Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai, is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is isn't prepared for: telepathic powers connect him to 1,000 other 'midnight children' all of whom have unusual gifts.

‘Midnight’s Children’ is an epic novel that opens up with a child being born at midnight on 15th August, 1947 and is show more divided in to three parts, the novel begins with the story of Sinai’s family and the various events that lead to India’s independence and eventually to partition.

Rushdie is undoubtedly an extraordinary writer and 'Midnight’s Children' is a complex novel told by an unreliable, at times annoying, but fascinating narrator. It is a story in which reality meets myth, in which dreams turn into facts, in which countries live lives resembling closely those of human beings that inhabit them. A story that highlights the relation between father and son and a nation yet in its pubescent stage. Saleem's story is a family saga like no other, a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India.

Finally, there is a very human dimension to this book. There are glimpses into souls of people living in India, Kashmir and Pakistan. There is rich and poor, powerful and helpless, loyalty and betrayal, love and heart break, and above all there is a little boy questioning his identity who grows into a man who loves his country but isn’t afraid to examine its issues.

Rushdie is without doubt a bold writer and I'm usually a big fan of historical fiction, so why didn't I enjoy it more. Firstly Rushie’s style of writing took some adjusting to, it took an awful lot of effort and concentration. Secondly, its humour whilst unique was so dark that it was at times really uncomfortable to read. But most importantly it felt self-indulgent at times, as if Rushdie was deliberately trying to confuse his reader. Rushdie sometimes seemed to go off on tangents, which partially contributed unnecessarily to the novel’s considerable length. show less

The Satanic Verses is arguably Rushdie's most famous book, perhaps because it was the one that landed a fatwa on his head, but this one is my favorite. Every, single, word, is delicious. As a warning, my mother, who is my best reader friend, found his style too florid. I, however, could soak in it until my fingers get pruny, and never get tired. If you like sagas, sarcasm, fated coincidences, and utterly beautiful, imaginative, lustrous writing, read this right away in case you get hit by a bus tomorrow. One of my top favorite books of all time.